Courses are completed entirely on line,
using interactive self-assessment exercises
and video tutorials.

Students successfully completing the course are
awarded a certificate from City College Manchester.

For further details and an explanatory
brochure, send an email message to –

heather@turbotext.co.uk

0— Pub quiz – Question #1

Which musician discovered the planet Uranus?

0— ‘Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir’

This is a re-issue of the first full length
critical study on Virginia Woolf to appear
in English. It was written in 1936 by Winifred
Holtby, a radical feminist, a journalist, and
author of ‘South Riding’.

She actually *knew* Virginia Woolf, and quite
clearly appreciated her radical literary
developments. The book gives a brief account
of her life, then discusses her work in
roughly chronological order.

She’s particularly good on Woolf as a
literary critic, and certainly appreciated
all of the important themes in Woolf’s
work for which she is now justly famous.

This week the 2007 bestseller list, published
by Japan’s biggest book distributor, Tohan,
revealed that five of the year’s most successful
novels, including the top three, were first
written for downloading on mobile phones
before being republished in book form.

The number one seller, Love Sky, sold two
million copies in the last year, has recently
been released as a hit film, and has made a
star of its author, a woman in her early
20s known only as Mika.

A sequel, Your Sky, came in at number three,
and second place went to Red String by Mei,
which sold one million copies. All are written
in short, simple sentences using relatively
few characters, featuring melodramatic plots
heavy on violence, sex and tear-jerking sentiment.

Love Sky, for example, tells the story of a
teenage girl who is bullied, gang-r.a.p.e.d,
becomes pregnant and suffers a miscarriage.

Amazon.com is currently displaying a
beautiful handwritten book by J.K.Rowling.
It’s worth a look. Here’s their announcement.

“We’re incredibly excited to announce that
Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling’s ‘The Tales
of Beedle the Bard’ at an auction held by
Sotheby’s in London.

The book of five wizarding fairy tales,
referenced in the last book of the Harry
Potter series, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows’, is one of only seven handmade copies
in existence.

The purchase price was UKP 1,950,000, and
Ms.Rowling is donating the proceeds to
The Children’s Voice campaign, a charity
she co-founded to help improve the lives
of institutionalized children across Europe.”

Do you know what a ‘carpet muncher’ and ‘a lady
in comfortable shoes’ have in common? Or would
you know how to ‘paint the baby’s bedroom’?

If you need an explanation of ‘the vinegar strokes’
or ‘spanking the monkey’ – then look no further.

This book is a compendium of all the slang words
you will ever need – plus a lot more you might not
*want* to know. And it’s hysterically funny.

It’s compiled from the pages of VIZ – the very
politically IN-correct comic monthly. Somebody
gave me a copy as a present, and I haven’t stopped
laughing since. DEFINITELY not for the faint-hearted.

There’s a new and hugely enlarged [sic] edition
which the publisher describes as “an exhaustive
lexicon of four letter filth which contains over
10,000 useful words and phrases to turn the air
bluer than a baboon’s a.r.s.e.”